Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism and Wild Thorns

¶ … Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism and Wild Thorns The novel has something to say about the relationship between gender and colonialism. Discuss the representations of women in the novel and contrast them to the representations of men. Use specific examples. The idea of a boy "becoming a real man" also looms rather large in the novel.

But what do you think the author is saying about this process of "becoming a man?" How are masculinity and femininity impacted by colonialism? How might Cesaire address the question of gender and colonialism? How is his treatment of the question different from, or similar to, that of the novel? In Wild Thorns, the Palestinian boy at the heart of the narrative feels deprived of his identity as a citizen, but also as a man.

He lives in a world where he constantly feels the forces of occupation, where Israeli soldiers hold guns, but where he is deprived of the 'privilege' of military resistance. Growing up within a culture where masculinity has such a high priority, this is extremely damaging to the boy's sense of self. Women, it is suggested, simply do not understand how damaging this is to the developing adolescent male Palestinian psyche.

Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism however, has the potential to offer a slightly less patriarchal view of constructions of identity to the Palestinian protagonist. In Cesaire's implied worldview, Africa has often been construed as the feminine, and therefore the inferior, to the expressed European worldview.

Although this is not said explicitly in the text, when Cesaire says that Africa must attempt to reconfigure the current world's binaries of colonial relationships, he means that Africa has always been considered primitive in relationship to Europe, because it is less economically strong than Europe. Similarly women have often been construed as less economically strong than men, because they have been oppressed and denied similar opportunities at economic betterment.

As a caution to too over-zealous an emphasis upon this, though, one must note that this does not mean that women should be 'like men' in terms of the ways that they act, economically, in the world. Rather, it means that women's accomplishments and values must be reconsidered in a larger worldview that similarly does not privilege simply making money or engaging in economic profiteering.

To view the world through a less capitalist gaze means that not only women will be more valued, and what has been traditionally defamed as women's work will be more valued, but also will mean that nations such as Africa will be able to reassert their national identity and self-esteem on a global level. Cesaire calls for a new way of valuing national identity, a sweeping reassessment of the world economic paradigm of capitalism, as it existed during his book's authorship during the 1950's.

The mindset of how a nation is valued must be reinvigorated and reconfigured in the world, not only the fact that Africa must become economically strong, and treat its ills of hunger and disease. Mentally, the mind must be "de-colonized" the "inner life," of development must be shorn as well. Wild Thorns as a novel almost seamlessly elides between the narrator's consciousness of himself as a Palestinian, referring to himself as a part of a "we".